FBI Director James Comey, left, accompanied by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, speaks at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on world wide threats on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 25, 2016.
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Similar to the San Bernardino case, federal prosecutors in NY sought a court order via an 18th century statute called the All Writs Act to compel Apple to help access an iPhone seized during a methamphetamine trafficking investigation.
Apple also laid out the resources it believes would be necessary to comply with the government’s request, saying it would likely require a team of up to 10 Apple engineers and employees for as long as four weeks. “This would be bad for America”. RGS companies remain committed to providing law enforcement with the help it needs while protecting the security of their customers and their customers’ information.
A federal judge in California ordered Apple to help the FBI unlock the phone, but Apple has warned that writing the code that the FBI requested could imperil devices far beyond the one that the bureau is asking to access.
The FBI wants Apple to write software that would give them unlimited attempts at the PIN with a computer program, but Apple’s answer is a hard no. In a motion to dismiss the court’s order, filed Thursday, the company says it’s cooperated with investigators as much as it can, and this software request is risky, illegal and unconstitutional.
Days after making his first public statement on the matter in an Internet blog post, Comey appeared determined to tamp down the tension that has flared publicly between the government and the company in the week since the judge’s order.
“The government says: “Just this once” and ‘Just this phone, ‘ ” the motion notes.
“If we’re going to move to a world where that is not possible anymore, the world will not end, but it will be a different world than where we are today”, he said.
And it accused the government of working under a closed courtroom process under the auspices of a terrorism investigation of trying “to cut off debate and circumvent thoughtful analysis”.
Comey insisted Thursday that the code – which Apple says does not exist – “works only on this one phone”. “In most cases, rather than challenge the orders in court, Apple simply deferred complying with them, without seeking appropriate judicial relief”. “It is incredibly ironic”, Apple CEO Tim Cook told ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir during a February 24 interview, framing the ongoing and divisive struggle.
As we previously reported, that vetting process could go beyond Apple’s own internal systems, especially if the information from the iPhone would be used in court.
“This (master key) is not something we would create”, Cook said.
Apple has resisted, maintaining that software that opens a single iPhone could be exploited to hack into millions of other devices.
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Comey said he had been told by technology experts that the combination of the phone and operating system are “sufficiently unusual that it’s unlikely to be a trailblazer because of technology being the limiting principle”. Apple has argued that doing so would make other iPhones more susceptible to hacking by authorities or criminals in the future.
